


fire and dust (pale witching moonlight)

by Starsilver



Category: Bleach
Genre: Deity!Ichigo, Fox!Ichigo, Gen, Gin: Schrödinger's Shinigami, Kitsune!Ichigo, M/M, asking for a friend, is he alive or is he dead? We just don’t know, is it slow burn if they’re technically married?, kitsunegeddon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 10:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16061294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starsilver/pseuds/Starsilver
Summary: The world turns. The tides shift. Gods rise and fall but never die.





	fire and dust (pale witching moonlight)

**Author's Note:**

> Adain this is all your fault. why am I up at 11 pm.
> 
> this probably counts as a cliffhanger. enjoy!

Once, the world was filled with spirits. They brought massive devastations and small gifts, vast mercies and tiny ruins, and people worshipped.

The spirits grew ever stronger, fed by prayer and offering. They fought the ghosts of the restless dead who remained too long, who denied the pull of the next step in their cycles. The most powerful were named as gods, divine, and so it was for years and years beyond count.

Then the world turned, tides shifted, and humans began to make their own miracles.

Some adapted.

Lightning spirits dart across telephone wires in the crackle of electricity. Inari coils through office buildings, tails intangible and heavy, bringing keen eyes and good fortune to their favored.

Some did not.

Change brought ill times to the kami of forest and field, of the wild singing soul of the mountains. Their shrines grew smaller, their worship weaker.

But here is a secret: gods do not die.

The world turned, tides shifted, and the spirits of nature, of meadow flowers and cold clean snowmelt, of hunt and prey, slept and dreamt. They waited for the world to turn and the tides to shift in their favor once more.

In their long dreaming, they sunk through the boundaries between life and death. The power of even a small god is not a small thing, and it unmoving for ages warped the edges of the worlds.

It was a slow change, even for beings who measure time in eons, and they did not wake.

Many of those dreaming gods were nine-tailed foxes, they of the lonely forest shrines and the starlight on moonless nights; they of the quick wit and cunning. By chance, one among the kitsune found himself closer to the walls of Seireitei than any other of his brethren. For many centuries he was undisturbed.

It was not to last. 

In Seireitei there was a young shinigami who sought power for power’s sake. He thought that was what he wanted above all else, and so that was what his desires became. He delved deeply into old writings and older things, things from before the Gotei, until at last he found what he was searching for: power he had not earned, power already claimed; the sleeping form of a nine-tailed fox god closer to the walls than any of his brethren.

There are many things that can be done to a god in slumber.

Remember: gods cannot die.

But they can fade.

(Break the power of a god, and there is a spirit. Break a spirit open, and what is left?)

The nine-tailed kitsune who had slumbered closer to the walls of Seireitei than any other of his brethren exhaled one more time, deep beneath the earth, and vanished. 

 

 

(Elsewhere, a newborn baby with fox-orange hair screwed his eyes shut and _wailed_.)


End file.
